Basically I want to know how you feel about people that are primary school teachers (age 5 - 11).
Is it a difficult job ? compared to jobs like librarian, newsagents staff, surgeon, investment banker, where does it fit in the scale.
should the pay be more, less or stay the same ?
When someone with a good degree from a good university with a top grade chose to be a teacher, how do you feel ? Are they taking an easy route through life ? or are they really doing it for the kids ?
Once a teacher has been working for several years, is lesson planning still difficult ?
Id like to here from the teachers, do youever think “jee, I wish I was the editor of The Times, this is a nightmare” or do you skip to work knowing that you have an easy day ahead of you ?
It’s a pretty difficult job, which requires the teacher to be “on” pretty much all the time. I could not do it myself (I worked in a classroom for a year). A really good teacher works very hard at it.
Depends. Around here, teachers make a pretty good salary. Also, the entire school system is broken IMO in a pretty fundamental way.
Probably doing it for the kids; no one in their right mind would choose teaching as a way to coast through life.
I would imagine so, as educational trends change and schools require different materials and techniques. Kids themselves change a bit too over the years (that is, first graders now are not quite the same as first graders in 1990 were). And one group of children is going to have a very different dynamic than another, and you have to take that into consideration; what worked great last year may well flop with this year’s class.
Teaching the little ones is not for the faint of heart. I only deal with kids on athletic fields or with the Scouts, and there are times it takes 100% of my patience to get through a 2 hour session.
I can only imagine what it takes to handle a full week of it. Now, there are some people that find this easy. There are also people who find sales easy. There are people that find math easy. In all of these cases, guessing if a job is “hard” is VERY dependent on your personality. My wife is PhD level researcher and loves sitting in her office running data to be published in esoteric journals. I could never do that. I stand up in front of crowds of strangers on a regular basis with minimal prep - she says that would be the hardest thing in the world.
Should we pay them more? I don’t know - are you getting quality teachers for what you spend today? Economics says that if we are filling our schools with great teachers at current pay levels, then we are fine. However, if you are NOT getting the teachers you want, you need to find a way to attract the higher caliber ones.
Finally, when it comes to updating the lesson plans, it depends on the district. In some areas you have to constantly adjust to match the latest and greatest directives from Washington DC and down. You also adjust to a particular set of students as well.
I’m sure teachers’ pay varies quite a bit from place to place. But, from what little I’ve heard (I’m definitely not an expert), if we want to hire and keep better teachers, the biggest obstacle isn’t low pay but the things that make their jobs harder than they have to be, like overcrowded classrooms, lack of support from principals, the beaurocratic hassles they have to deal with, etc.
I think that’s frequently true; people with a real passion for teaching don’t go into it to get rich, and making the teaching itself easier would often be the better route. At the same time, many people who would like to teach, but are worried about supporting their families, go into industry instead of teaching for the higher salaries. It would be nice if it was easier to become a teacher without having to worry about supporting a family, but I don’t know if there’s a lot of need to make teaching into a really high-paying job like law, which would tend to attract people interested in money rather than in the actual children. (Ha ha, as if that would ever happen anyway.)
Salaries are so connected to local conditions that it’s very difficult to make any statements about pay for teachers; ours are good, while teachers in poverty-stricken areas make quite a bit less for a lot more work. I think it’s a really bad thing that school money is paid by local property taxes; it makes the bad problems worse.
To some degree it depends on the school. In a middle class suburb, it’s not that hard. In an inner city (where I did it) , it’s hell.
Way more.
They definitely aren’t doing it for the money, and there’s nothing “easy” about it.
I didn’t do it long enough to find out, but the veterans seemed like they had their routines down pretty cold. They could tweak things here or there, but they had a basic framework to work with. It’s really the execution that’s hard, not the planning.
I didn’t regret it, but I wished the job would have paid more and I wished that more of the parents gave a shit about their kids. Discipline in a classroom is all but impossible f a kid knows there will never be any consequences at home.
You can’t fit job “Hardness” on to one linear scale. Some parts of being a teacher are hard and some are easy. Having to be “on” seven hours a day, and controlling the welfare of 20-30 kids, is very hard. Having summer off is very easy. Having no flexibility in your working hours can be hard. Not having to do night shifts or business travel is easy. It depends what YOU personally like and don’t like to work at.
It depends where you are. In some jurisdictions teachers are paid for more or far less than in others. Around here, teacher pay is pretty good. But in some places it is not.
Whether the pay should be more, less or the same is up to the people who hire the teachers. If you don’t have enough teachers available with the qualifications you want, then you probably aren’t paying enough. If you have a surplus, you’re paying too much.
It’s fashionable for people to say “oooh, we should pay teachers more” but nobody wants to see their taxes jacked up to it. If my province were to give every teacher a 10% raise the cost to the province - and I’m guessing low here - would be six hundred million dollars. That’s not exactly chump change. I don’t personally wanna spend that money unless you can show me evidence it will improve things.
What teachers should be paid depends on how many teachers you want and what you want their qualifications to be. Once you determrine THAT, then you set salaries at a level that will attract a sufficient number of qualified teachers.
It would be really nice if you could pay them more than that, but why would you? Because teaching is valuable work? Well, of course it is, but all work is valuable. Cab drivers are valuable. Welders are valuable. Migrant farm workers are valuable. Tour guides are valuable. Everyone who contributes work is valuable, and you figure the value by setting the price (the pay) at the level that brings in the amount and quality of labor you need.
Who cares?
It depends on what changes take place. If you get moved from teaching Grade 7 to Grade 4 you have to do everything over again. If the curriculum changes, so do your lesson plans. From one year to the next there may be almost no change at all, and then the following year you might have to overhaul everything.
Teachers should be paid A LOT! IMO. They are preparing our young to grow up and run the world. I also think there should be a more rigorous screening process to weed out the mediocre ones. I know we have mediocre teachers because of a shortage of exceelent ones but if a teacher could make say $100K after they have been teaching for awhile I think more people would be teachers and thus we would have enough to where there would only be excellent teachers.
In Oklahoma where my dad lives a teacher who is single can make enough to buy a house.
Here is southern California I doubt a husband and wife who are both teachers could afford a house.
The house my mom and step-dad bought here in SoCal for $450K would probably only be like $80-100K out where my dad lives.
I’ve dated two teachers. While they were not at the primary level (one HS and one college), it would be extremely incorrect to say that they didn’t work the night shift. Both were usually busy up until midnight.
At our little private school, the head of the school has always made sure that her best teachers were with the youngest kids (preschool). Good teachers in the early years are vital to a child’s later success IMO.
It was true for me, and it seems to be true for my kids so far.
Thanks for all of the replies.
My sister is will be starting her first teaching job in september (6/7 yr olds). I wasn’t expecting your views to be so one sided, as my sister has always had coments like “you’re just doing it for the holidays” or “that will be easy, what will you do ? read stories all day ?”.
Primary school teachers work very hard, and deserve all credit and pay they receive – and more. Here they’re measured up against secondary school teachers, which is unfair, and they always follow the latter in terms of pay parity.
No, it is not a difficult job. Tedious perhaps, but not difficult.
Difficult in terms of what? Do they work 80 hour weeks, including weekends and holidays like an investment banker? Do they live out of a suitcase like a management consultant? Must they undergo the scrutiny of a lawyer? Do they work summers like everyone else on the planet?
It should be what it is. If school systems want better teachers, they should pay more money. If they are happy with who they have, leave the salaries as is. No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to be a teacher. If you want more money, go be an I-banker.
Maybe they like kids or don’t want to work in the corporate world. I don’t know. Most people I know who went into teaching were people my GF was friends with in college. She went off to NYU to get her MBA and work in finance while a lot of her friends graduated with liberal arts degrees, got married at 23 and became schoolteachers.
I would imagine, like anything else, it gets easier after you have done it a few times.
I taught fourth grade (9-10 year olds) in inner-city Houston for several years.
Having never worked those jobs, I can’t say. But I do think people tend to not respect the amount of effort it takes to be a good teacher. Especially in the high-stakes testing environment. There is incredible pressure to teach to the test and fend off threats of reconstitution and closure. It isn’t fun and games with fingerpaints anymore - as if it ever was. Teachers are being made to be accountable for student success, and the reality is, much of student success is untheorized. In other words, people are going into classrooms every day, and depending on what research (in some cases) the principal or district subscribes to, doing very different things from district to district. It’s pretty difficult because success is elusive, and may have as much to do with whom you teach and where you teach as your actual competence in the classroom.
Without question, more. Good teachers teach, but they also counsel and comfort kids. For a lot of the kids I taught, school was one of the few stable places in their lives. I could never figure out why so many kids came to school early and left late. It’s because of the predictability. If someone called you a name or hit you, there would be a consequence. You ate breakfast at 7:10 am. And so on.
Not to brag, but you’re talking about me. I was a distinguished grad of my college, one of 12 chosen over several thousand grads. I was an honors major. Teaching is without question the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I did it because I care passionately about civil rights and equality, and education is the surest path to social advancement we have. Writing a dissertation, teaching graduate students, and conducting research is difficult. But I don’t have anywhere near the same level of pressure. If I do my work poorly for a day, or for several days, I know that I have ways of rationalizing it. I teach at an elite university so the students will get something out of the class. If I didn’t do my job as a teacher well every day, the kids who had the toughest road to success would pay a price. I wasn’t perfect every day, but you can bet that mindset drove me every day, and is why I was at school early, left late, and worked Saturday school as well.
I’d say it gets much easier. In fact, one the biggest misconceptions that the teachers I used to train had was that somehow creating innovative, unique lessons was the hallmark of being a great teacher. It isn’t. There’s a place of creativity, but there’s also tricks and lessons that teachers have done for years that work great. You have to swallow your pride and do it for the millionth time. Guess what, though? Your kids haven’t done it before, so it’s new to them.
The hard thing about lesson planning is aligning lesson objectives to the state standards. Because the standards can change from year to year, you might find yourself having to drop a unit and instead teach or reteach something else. And if you have a school with tracking, you might have a class where the students performed poorly in one area, and you might have to spend a lot of the fourth grade reteaching topics from the third grade… but you’re still responsible for getting them ready for the fourth grade test. Also, figuring out how much of a lesson should be guided practice, how much should be group work, how much should be independent… how to reteach or work with kids who don’t get it, but simultaneously challenge kids that excel.
Yeah, it’s tough. It does get easier over time though.
Well, it’s never easy. But it’s always challenging, and that’s the fun part about being a teacher. Day to day it is rarely the same. A good teacher is a great multitasker, so I imagine being editor of the Times would be something that a good teacher could do fairly well…
You have got to be kidding. Many teachers also work extended days, Saturday school, and summer school. How do papers get graded? How do lessons get planned? It’s not done during the school day. I probably worked around 60 hours a week easily, and I was hardly a master teacher.
Sunday was grading and lesson planning day at my house. My roommates and I were always working.
Kids bring all kinds of issues from home, many of which will require teachers to follow legal protocols and the like. Child abuse, sexual molestation… you name it. Teachers have legal obligations about what to do when they suspect or hear that it might be happening. If not correctly followed, you can lose your job. Happened to a friend of mine in her first year teaching… it was a terrible experience for her. There are also guidelines in how you talk to children, how you physically touch them (if the situation requires that you do, like if a fight breaks out). There are probably few jobs where you have to simultaneously make good decisions to avoid litigation.
Perhaps tenured teachers take the summers off. Almost every teacher I knew either taught summer school, trained other teachers in the summer, or worked on professional development. Outside of the 30 year veterans in my school, I didn’t know anybody who dropped the chalk on the last day of class and just showed up the day after Labor Day. Every year, state guidelines change, and teachers have to spend the summer learning the changes. Not to mention the necessity of credentialing or taking courses. In my district, we needed something like 30 hours of PD a year. Summer is when a lot of folks do this.
Sounds like you don’t know much at all about teaching. :rolleyes:
